The man had only tied her with a bit of leather, no stronger than the thong that had held her herb-bag. If she wriggled just right, bracing her tied hands against her feet, she could probably snap it.
She prayed, and pulled. And was rewarded with the welcome release of pressure as the thong snapped.
She brought her hands in front of her, hiding them in her tunic, and looked up quickly; the fight had involved a couple more of the bandits. She and the other girl were in the shadows now, for the fire had been obscured by the men standing or scuffling around it. If she crept away quickly and quietly—
No sooner thought than done. She started to crawl away, got as far as the edge of the firelight, then looked back.
The other girl was still huddled where she had been left, eyes closed. Too stupid or too frightened to take advantage of the opportunity to escape.
If Elfrida left her there, they probably wouldn’t try to recapture her. They’d have one girl still, and wouldn’t go hunting in the dark for the one that had gotten away. . . .
Elfrida muttered an oath, and crawled back.
Leonie huddled with the witch-girl under the shelter of a fallen tree, and they listened for the sounds of pursuit. She had been praying as hard as she could, eyes closed, when a painful tug on the twine binding her wrists had made her open her eyes.
“Well, come
They had splashed through a stream, running along a moonlit path, until Leonie’s sides ached. Finally the girl had pulled her off the path and shoved her under the bulk of a fallen tree, into a little dug-out den she would never have guessed was there. From the musky smell, it had probably been made by a fox or badger. Leonie huddled in the dark, trying not to sob, concentrating on the pain in her side and not on the various fates the witch-girl could have planned for her.
Before too long, they heard shouts in the distance, but they never came very close. Leonie strained her ears, holding her breath, to try and judge how close their pursuers were, and jumped when the witch-girl put a hand on her.
“Don’t,” the girl whispered sharply. “You won’t be going far with your hands tied like that. Hold still! I’m not going to hurt you.”
Leonie stuttered something about demons, without thinking. The girl laughed.
“If I had a demon to come when I called, do you think I would have let a bastard like that lay hands on me?” Since there was no logical answer to that question, Leonie wisely kept quiet. The girl touched her hands, and then seized them; Leonie kept herself from pulling away, and a moment later, felt the girl sawing at her bonds with a bit of sharp rock. Every so often the rock cut into Leonie instead of the twine, but she bit her lip and kept quiet, gratitude increasing as each strand parted. “What were you doing out here, anyway?” the girl asked.“I thought they kept your kind mewed up like prize lambs.”
“I had a vision—” Leonie began, wondering if by her words and the retelling of her holy revelation, the witch-girl might actually be converted to Christianity. It happened that way all the time in the tales of the saints, after all. . . .
So while the girl sawed patiently at the bonds with the sharp end of the rock, Leonie told her everything, from the time she realized that something was wrong, to the moment the bandit took her captive. The girl stayed silent through all of it, and Leonie began to hope that she
The girl waited until she had obviously come to the end, then laughed, unpleasantly. “Suppose, just suppose,” she said, “I were to tell you that the
The last of the twine snapped as she finished, and Leonie pulled her hands away. “Then I would say that your vision is wrong, evil,” she retorted. “There is no goddess, only the Blessed Virgin—”
“Who is one face of the Goddess, who is Maiden, Mother and Wise One,” the girl interrupted, her words dripping acid. “Only a fool would fail to see that. And your White Christ is no more than the Sacrificed One in one of
“Your cauldron is some demon-thing,” Leonie replied, angrily. “Only the Grail—”
Whatever else she was going to say was lost, as the tree-trunk above them was riven into splinters by a bolt of lightning that blinded and deafened them both for a moment.
When they looked up, tears streaming from their eyes, it was to see something they both recognized as The Enemy.
Standing over them was a shape, outlined in a glow of its own. It was three times the height of a man, black and hairy like a bear, with the tips of its outstretched claws etched in fire. But it was not a bear, for it wore a leather corselet, and its head had the horns of a bull, the snout and tusks of a boar, dripping foam and saliva, and its eyes, glowing an evil red, were slitted like a goat’s.
Leonie screamed and froze. The witch-girl seized her bloody wrist, hauled her to her feet, and ran with her stumbling along behind.
The beast roared and followed after. They had not gotten more than forty paces down the road, when the witch-girl fell to the ground with a cry of pain, her hand slipping from Leonie’s wrist.
